Entries in Rush Limbaugh
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ABC News(CHICAGO) -- Mitt Romney, in his bid to retake the momentum in the Republican primary from Rick Santorum with a win next week in Illinois, arrives in Chicago on Friday. But the city’s mayor and former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel couldn’t wait to rip into the GOP front-runner, saying Romney lacked “the fortitude, strength or character” to serve in the Oval Office.

“Now I’m not going to give advice to Republicans. They don’t take it and I don’t want to give it. They’ll make whatever decision they want to make,” Emanuel said at an event Thursday morning in Chicago. “You just take a look at the fortitude, the strength, the determination and the vision the president made on the auto industry and juxtapose it to Mitt Romney, who doesn’t have the fortitude, the strength or the character in my view to stand up to Rush Limbaugh. How can he stand up and make a decision to save 1.3 million manufacturing jobs?

“That Oval Office requires vision. That Oval Office requires spine. That Oval Office requires determination and grit. Mitt Romney says, ‘Let it go.’ The president said the American workers are too important to let go, and he doubled down on the American workers. When a decision comes to the Oval Office, who’s got the fortitude, who’s got the grit, who’s got the determination and who’s got the back of the American people and middle-class families? And nothing coming into that Oval Office is easy. It’s not clear. And I think when you see the character, the fortitude and the strength measured up, and the determination to reject conventional wisdom and see around the corner what’s right for the American middle class, people who work every day, play by the rules, you’ll see the difference of the two individuals and their vision for America,” he continued.

A reporter followed up by pointing out to Emanuel that Bill Maher had made comments that some people found as insulting as Limbaugh’s. Limbaugh was ripped by liberals for insulting Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, while Maher has caught flak from conservatives for remarks he made about former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

“I thought what Rush Limbaugh said was … absolutely not only wrong, it was absolutely repulsive,” Emanuel said. “That said, if you can’t stand up to Rush, how are you going to stand up to Russia? And I just don’t see it. I’m just telling you, having advised two presidents, and I think I’m very fortunate, it takes fortitude in the Oval Office, it takes strength, it takes determination, and the two individuals -- the president of the United States and Mitt Romney -- had a different vision when it came to the auto industry, and I’m saying the Oval Office requires a person of character to make those calls.”

On Friday, President Obama returns to Chicago for a fundraiser, the same day Romney makes a campaign stop in the Windy City.

The Illinois Republican primary is next Tuesday, and polls currently show a close race between Romney and Santorum.﻿

ABC News(NEW YORK) -- Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh has been inundated with criticism after calling Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University student who testified before a House committee about contraception, a “slut” and a “prostitute.” But while Democrats have fiercely condemned the comments, Republicans’ ire has been significantly more muted.

ABC’s George Will said Sunday on This Week that GOP leaders have steered clear of harshly denouncing Limbaugh’s comments because “Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh.”

“[House Speaker John] Boehner comes out and says Rush’s language was inappropriate. Using the salad fork for your entrée, that’s inappropriate. Not this stuff,” Will said. “And it was depressing because what it indicates is that the Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh.”

ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd said the Republicans’ apprehension to say anything negative about the conservative big hitter is based on the “myth” that Limbaugh influences a large number of Republican voters.

“I think the problem is the Republican leaders, Mitt Romney and the other candidates, don’t have the courage to say what they say in quiet, which, they think Rush Limbaugh is a buffoon,” Dowd said. “They think he is like a clown coming out of a small car at a circus. It’s great he is entertaining and all that. But nobody takes him seriously.”

While President Obama has denounced Limbaugh’s comments as “reprehensible,” Republican leaders and GOP presidential candidates have used far milder language.

While Rick Santorum said Limbaugh’s comments were “absurd,” he said the radio host was an “entertainer” and “an entertainer can be absurd.”

“No,” Will said about Santorum’s response. “It is the responsibility of conservatives to police the right and its excesses, just as the liberals unfailingly fail to police the excesses on their own side.”

Rather than criticizing Limbaugh’s choice of words, Newt Gingrich instead blasted Obama for “opportunistically” calling Fluke on Friday to thank her for testifying.

When Gingrich was asked on Sunday about what Democrats are calling the Republican “war on women,” Gingrich again trained his scorn at the president, saying the issue was really about “religious liberty.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan said during the This Week Round Table that Limbaugh’s comments “confused the issue.”

“It played into this trope that the Republicans have a war on women. No, they don’t, but he made it look they that way,” Noonan said. “It confused the larger issue, which is the real issue, which is ‘Obama-care,’ and its incursions against religious freedoms, which is a serious issue. It was not about this young lady at Georgetown.”

Noonan said Limbaugh’s comments were “crude, rude, even piggish” and that they were “deeply destructive and unhelpful.”

“It was just unacceptable, he ought to be called on it,” she said. “I’m glad he has apologized.”

Limbaugh issued an apology to Fluke on Saturday, saying his “choice of words was not the best” and that he did not mean for his “insulting word choice” to come off as a “personal attack.”

Gingrich did concede that Limbaugh was “right to apologize.”

But even his apology has been scorned. Obama’s senior campaign adviser David Axelrod told me Sunday that Limbaugh’s “quasi-apology” was based on the same “falsehood” as his original comments, which he said were “predicated on a lie” that taxpayers will have to foot the bill for birth control when in fact insurance companies will pick up the tab.

“I think what Rush Limbaugh said about that young woman was not only vile and degrading to her, but to women across the country,” Axelrod said.

Official White House photo by Pete Souza(NEW YORK) -- Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Friday mocked President Obama for supporting a Georgetown law student who testified to Congress that birth control should be covered by health insurance, drawing out the culture war over contraception that has consumed the political world for the past week.

Shortly before the student, Sandra Fluke, gave an interview on the cable network MSNBC on Friday, Obama called her to tell her that her parents should be proud of her for speaking out for women.

After learning of the president's phone call during his radio show Friday, a day after he chided Fluke over her sex life, Limbaugh made a kissing noise with his lips and mocked Obama.

"That is so compassionate. What a great guy," Limbaugh said. "The president called her to make sure she's OK. What is she, 30 years old? Thirty years old, student at Georgetown Law who admits to having so much sex she can't afford it."

In response to a question from ABC's Jake Tapper, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Obama called Fluke to "express his disappointment that she has been the subject of inappropriate personal attacks and to thank her for exercising her rights as a citizen to speak out on an issue of public policy."

Limbaugh replied by arguing that Obama should return the $1 million donation that the comedian Bill Maher gave his super PAC.

Limbaugh continued to focus on Fluke today, saying she "hilariously" testified to Congress that "she's having so much sex" that health insurance should cover her birth control.

"Not one person says, 'Well, did you ever think about maybe backing off the amount of sex you have?'" Limbaugh said.

He also claimed that Democrats "want to blame me as being the person they should fear."

Limbaugh first thrust himself into the center of the contraception debate on Wednesday when he called Fluke a "slut" on his radio show for arguing to Congress that the expense for her birth control should be covered by her employer's health care plan.

As the Senate voted down a Republican effort that would have allowed employers not to cover contraception in their health plans, Limbaugh enraged the left by saying that Fluke was "having so much sex she can't afford her own birth control pills and she agrees that Obama should provide them, or the pope."

Limbaugh went on a tirade Monday to complain that the storm was “politicized” to provide a boost to President Obama’s reelection chances in 2012.

According to the right-wing pundit, the White House and the national media were both hoping that Irene would cause far more death and destruction than what actually occurred. A huge disaster would have revived Obama’s political fortunes, Limbaugh said, not to mention help prove climate change theory touted by the administration and the media.

Limbaugh mused, “It was a lesson, if you pay any attention to this, the hype, the desire for chaos, I mean literally, the media desire for chaos was a great learning tool, this was a great illustration of how all of the rest of the media in news, in sports, has templates and narratives and exaggerates beyond reality, creating fear so as to create interest.”

Photo Courtesy - ABC News(WASHINGTON) -- During the recent campaign, Republican Congressman Darrell Issa -- the incoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee -- told Rush Limbaugh that Obama is “one of the most corrupt Presidents in modern times.”

Monday, he took it back.

When Issa was pressed by ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America, the congressman said that he “tried never to make it a personal statement about the president…I am not saying that the President is personally corrupt. But his administration has to change direction particularly after tax payer money.”

Top of Issa’s list -- figuring out what happened to the $700 billion in stimulus spending.

“That $700 billion is gone, we have to figure out, one, where it went and two, how to keep it from going away that way again. The American people cannot afford that,” he said.

Issa also rejected any temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts for wealthy.

“If anything this is wrong minded. In some ways you should say, ‘Look, if you invest today we will let you get a better deal three, four, five years from now because that is how you create jobs,’” he said. “Hopefully we will come to a compromise that does allow people to make decisions beyond just this tax year.”